Category Archives: Pakistan

Malala Yousafzai became the youngest-ever winner of the Nobel Peace Prize early Friday morning when the 17-year-old won the award, along with India’s Kailash Satyarthi, a longtime children’s rights activist, ‘for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.’

Malala’s story is well-known, largely due to the speculation that she would win the Nobel Prize last year, when the Nobel Committee instead awarded it to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for its work in eliminating chemical weapons from war-torn Syria.

A prolific writer as a teenager about life in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, she was on her way to school in Swat when a Taliban fundamentalist shot her in the head. She recovered, however, with ample treatment in both Pakistan and the United Kingdom. Following her recovery, as her story became widely known, she used her global platform to advocate for global education for all children, including women.

But beneath the headline, Yousafzai’s story intersects in odd and sometimes very complex ways with the currents of South Asian and Pakistani politics, including widespread anti-American sentiment, tumultuous disputes among Pakistan’s government, opposition and military, and a culture that still undermines women’s rights.

Amid the chaotic urban anarchy of Karachi and the lawlessness of tribal border areas near Afghanistan, it’s rare that Islamabad becomes the central focus of political instability in Pakistan.

But that’s exactly what’s happening this week in the world’s sixth-most populous country, and if protests against Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif explode into further unrest, it could trigger a constitutional crisis or even a military coup. That Pakistan’s fate is now so perilous represents a serious step backwards for a country that, just last year, marked the completion of its first full five-year term of civilian government and a democratic transfer of power.

Imran Khan (pictured above), the leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI, پاکستان تحريک انصاف, translated as the Pakistan Movement for Justice), is leading protests in the Pakistani capital calling for Sharif’s resignation relating to allegations of voter fraud in last year’s national elections. Sharif, in turn, is pressuring the country’s powerful military to guarantee order in Islamabad and the ‘red zone’ — a highly fortified neighborhood where many international embassies and the prime minister’s house are located and where Khan and his supporters have threatened to march if Sharif refuses to step down. Khan has increasingly escalated his demands, and he now seems locked in a high-stakes political struggle with Sharif that could end either or both of their careers.

In last May’s parliamentary elections, Sharif’s conservative, Punjab-based Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن) ousted the governing center-left, Sindh-based Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎). Khan’s anti-corruption party, the PTI, won 35 seats, the second-largest share of the vote nationally, and the largest share of the vote in regional elections in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the northwestern border region near Afghanistan that is home to nearly 22 million Pakistanis, largely on the strength of Khan’s denunciation of US drone strikes on the region. Though Khan and the PTI hoped for a better result, it was nevertheless their best result by far since Khan entered politics in 1996.

Earlier this week, Khan directed his party’s legislators to resign from of the national assembly and three of the four regional assemblies. (The PTI wouldn’t, after all, be resigning its seats in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where it controls the government).

Khan’s protests dovetail with similar protests led by Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri (pictured above), a Sufi cleric and scholar who leads a small but influential party, the Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT, پاکستان عوامي تحريک‎, translated as the Pakistan People’s Movement). Like Khan’s PTI, the PAT is an anti-corruption and pro-democratic party. Tahir-ul-Qadri, who returned to Pakistan in 2012 after living for seven years in Toronto, has been described as the ‘Anna Hazare’ of Pakistan, in reference to the Hindu social activist who’s fought against corruption in India, and he protested the PPP with equal gusto.

Early Thursday, there were hopes that negotiations among the parties could relieve the political crisis’s escalation, if not wholly end it. But it’s more complicated that, because of the delicate role that the military still plays in the country’s affairs.

Former Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi was sworn in today as India’s 14th prime minister in New Delhi today.

But as historic as his inauguration is, which brings to power Modi’s conservative, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, भारतीय जनता पार्टी) after a landslide victory in India’s April/May national elections with the largest mandate of any Indian political party since 1984, it’s been eclipsed by the presence of Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

It was the first time that a Pakistani leader has ever attended an Indian inauguration, and the handshake between Modi and Sharif is an audacious start for the Modi era. Modi, who has evinced a hawkish line on foreign policy, especially regarding India’s Muslim-majority neighbors, Pakistan and Bangladesh, made the surprising invitation to Sharif late last week. Sharif, much to the world’s surprise, and likely in opposition to hardliners in his own conservative party, the Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن) and within Pakistan’s military and intelligence communities, accepted invitation over the weekend.

Sharif joins a handful of regional leaders from within the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) to attend Modi’s swearing-in ceremony, including Sri Lanka president Mahinda Rajapaksa and Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai.

But Modi’s mandate is so sweeping that he has enough political capital to do just about whatever he wants, no matter what his allies think. Modi’s hawkish reputation, in combination with his parliamentary majority, could give him the space to pursue the kind of closer economic ties that have eluded prior Indian governments. Continue reading Photo of the day: Modi, Sharif meet at India’s inauguration→

Ending months of speculation, Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif announced late last week that Raheel Sharif (pictured above) is his choice to succeed Ashfaq Kayani as Pakistan’s new army chief of staff last week, just hours before Kayani’s resignation went into effect.

Though the two men share the same surname, it’s an open question as to which Sharif will be the more powerful person in Pakistani government over the years to come. The army chief of staff will significantly influence issues of security and foreign policy, including long-term prospects for more peaceful Indian-Pakistani ties, patrolling Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan (all the more relevant given that the US military pullout is likely to occur in 2014), dealing with the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (commonly referred to as the Pakistani Taliban), and the bilateral relationship with the United States, including the difficult issues of sovereignty and civilian deaths resulting from US drone strikes in northwestern Pakistan.

While Raheel Sharif may not exactly be able to set Pakistan’s policy on these issues, he can certainly complicate the civilian government’s policy decisions on security and foreign policy if he believes that they aren’t in the Pakistani military’s best interests.

What’s most interesting about the decision is that the last time Nawaz Sharif selected a new army chief of staff, as Pakistan’s prime minister in 1998, his choice was Pervez Musharraf, the third-most-senior officer at the time, who Sharif hoped would chart a more harmonious course in line with Sharif’s security policy than Jehangir Karamat, who Sharif dismissed earlier in 1998. Within a year, however, Musharraf had ousted Sharif in a military coup, ushering in yet another era of military government in Pakistan that would last nearly a decade, and which coincided with intense cooperation between the United States and Pakistan with respect to Afghanistan and, more generally, US military efforts against radical Islamic terror across the Middle East, South Asia and Africa.

Given the ominous precedent, it was important for Sharif to choose very wisely this time around — and so far, there’s every indication that the new army chief of staff, though somewhat of a surprise pick, is unlikely to pursue a radically different path from Kayani, who has worked hard to keep the Pakistani military’s policymaking role behind the scenes since his appointment in 2007. Kayani is credited, in part, with providing the backdrop of security and stability that allowed for the first government in Pakistani history to serve out its full five-year term, and his commitment to stable, civilian-led government is perhaps his chief legacy.

In choosing Raheel Sharif, Nawaz Sharif decided against Haroon Aslam, the most senior military officer, who was viewed as the frontrunner, and against Rashad Mehmood, who served as Kayani’s principal staff officer and has also served in the Inter-Services Intelligence, the top Pakistani spy agency.

Raheel Sharif was born in 1956 in Quetta, which is located in the relatively remote province of Balochistan in Pakistan’s southwest, and he comes from a family with a long military tradition — his brother was killed in the 1971 war with India and was awarded Pakistan’s highest military honor, the Nishan-i-Haider. Though just third in line in terms of military seniority, he has developed new training doctrines under Kayani’s leadership in transitioning the Pakistani army away from its traditional focus on India and toward a role based in counterinsurgency strategy. He has ties to both top army officials and the political elite and, in particular, is close to lieutenant-general and tribal affairs minister Abdul Qadir Baloch, who’s a key confidante to the prime minister.

Five years after returning to Pakistan and five years after the transition back to civilian rule, Nawaz Sharif returned to power after May’s parliamentary elections, which saw Sharif’s Punjab-based, center-right Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن) win a landslide victory against both the Sindh-based, center-left Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎) of Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s former president and widower of assassinated prime minster Benazir Bhutto, and the anti-corruption, populist Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice or PTI, پاکستان تحريک) of Imran Khan.

Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh met as planned in New York Sunday morning to discuss bilateral relations — even after 12 Indians were killed by suspected Pakistani terrorists in Kashmir last week.

Accordingly, the resulting understanding between the two was far wider than a mere handshake of the kind rumored last week to be in the works between US president Barack Obama and Iran’s new moderate president Hassan Rowhani:

The leaders agreed that their military chiefs should meet and investigate any attacks in disputed border regions in order to prevent a recurrence, Pakistani Foreign Secretary Jalil Jilani told reporters after their one-hour breakfast meeting, held three days after the latest deadly raid in Kashmir. Jilani didn’t specify when the military officials will meet.

The two also invited each other to their respective countries, Indian National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon said after yesterday’s meeting. “We have actually achieved a new stage and now have some understanding of how to improve going forward and I think that is an advance on one and a half years ago,” Menon said.

It’s important to note that both sides downplayed the significance of the meeting, but there’s reason for optimism — if such a strong statement resulted as a formal matter from the meeting, there’s reason to believe that Sharif and Singh could have discussed and agreed on much more. Sharif, in addition, agreed to ‘movement’ on Pakistan’s role in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks.

Sharif only began his third term as prime minister in June 2013, but he has indicated he wants to strengthen relations that have been strained since Partition in 1947 — primarily over India’s control of the provinces of Jammu and Kashmir along the Pakistani-Indian border, over which the two countries have gone to war twice. In an address earlier this week to the General Assembly, Sharif said that the nuclear arms race between the two countries was a waste of massive resources.

Singh, who has been hesitant to embrace Sharif’s overtures and claimed earlier this weekend that Pakistan is an epicenter of south Asian terrorism, is in his final months after what will be a decade as prime minister in India, and he’ll be succeeded by May 2014 by either the Indian National Congress (Congress, or भारतीय राष्ट्रीय कांग्रेस) standard-bearer Rahul Gandhi, the fourth-generation scion of the party’s (and perhaps India’s) leading political family or the chief minister of Gujarat state, Narendra Modi, who will lead the conservative, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, or भारतीय जनता पार्टी) into next spring’s elections and whose plucky style could mean a tense period for the bilateral relationship, given his alleged role in anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002.

So even though the meeting’s potential was always limited, there’s good reason to welcome it — for at least five reasons, as I argued over the weekend in The National Interest:

Boosting regional security will be even more important as the United States draws down troops from the Af-Pak theater in 2014.

Aside from Pakistan’s election in May, Iran’s election in June and India’s elections next year, Afghanistan will elect a president next spring and Bangladesh will hold elections in January. That means we could see five new leaders in the span of one year in southwest Asia, in addition to this year’s leadership transition in the People’s Republic of China.

The meeting can cement Sharif’s credentials as a strong — and democratic — leader as he contemplates who will succeed Ashfaq Parvez Kayani as the next army chief of staff.

Finally, while the world cares more about the potential of a nuclear-armed Iran, it’s easy to forget that both Pakistan and India have had nuclear weapons for a decade and a half. Cooperation between the two countries not only improves regional stability, but global stability.

While we still bask in the glow of tectonic movement between the United States and Iran, as well as an apparent resolution among the Security Council over Syria’s chemical weapons, there’s a third diplomatic front to keep an eye on.

For all of the hype over the potential meeting between US president Barack Obama and Iranian president Hassan Rowhani earlier this week at the United Nations General Assembly, tomorrow’s meeting between Pakistan’s new prime minister Nawaz Sharif and India’s outgoing prime minister Manmohan Singh comes at a crucial time — in the wake of an attack by Pakistani militants earlier this week in contested Jammu that seemed designed to keep the two south Asian neighbors at odds.

Sharif is just barely 100 days into his third term as prime minister and Singh is a lame-duck who will leave office no later than May 2014 after India’s next elections. While there’s a limit to what the meeting can accomplish, it’s important for at least five reasons, I argue this morning in The National Interest:

Boosting regional security will be even more important as the United States draws down troops from the Af-Pak theater in 2014.

Aside from Pakistan’s election in May, Iran’s election in June and India’s elections next year, Afghanistan will elect a president next spring and Bangladesh will hold elections in January. That means we could see five new leaders in the span of one year in southwest Asia, in addition to this year’s leadership transition in the People’s Republic of China.

The meeting can cement Sharif’s credentials as a strong — and democratic — leader as he contemplates who will succeed Ashfaq Parvez Kayani as the next army chief of staff.

Finally, while the world cares more about the potential of a nuclear-armed Iran, it’s easy to forget that both Pakistan and India have had nuclear weapons for a decade and a half. Cooperation between the two countries not only improves regional stability, but global stability.

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Pakistan has a new president, Mamnoon Hussain, following a hasty election by the National Assembly and the four provincial assemblies.

Given the strength of the hold that the Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن) has on Pakistan’s government following national elections earlier in May, the outcome was never really in doubt, and Hussain is a loyal supporter of newly elected prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

Hussain will succeed Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto and the de facto head of Pakistan’s opposition party, the Pakistan People’s Party ( PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎), which governed the country from 2008 until the PML-N’s victory earlier this year. Zardari, whose PPP took power in part due to sympathy from Pakistani voters following Bhutto’s December 2007 assassination, has never been incredibly beloved within the country, and his government soon became unpopular.

Zardari signed off on constitutional reforms stripped the presidency of much of its power in 2010, thereby avoiding impeachment from a flurry of corruption charges, from which Zardari has since been shielded, due to presidential immunity. By the time Zardari agreed to the constitutional amendment, he faced significant political protests and multiple showdowns with the Pakistani constitutional court. So the presidency that Hussain will assume is not the same presidency Zardari held and that former military leader and general Pervez Musharraf held before him — the president, for example, no longer has the power to dissolve Pakistan’s parliament or to make key military or foreign policy decisions.

Nonetheless, in his role as a top PPP leader, Zardari remained the most important leader in Pakistani politics, far overshadowing either of the two prime ministers that served him: Yousuf Raza Gillani from 2008 to 2012 and Raja Pervaiz Ashraf from 2012 until 2013. Gillani himself was forced out of office by Pakistan’s constitutional court when it declared Gillani retroactively disqualified after yet another dispute over corruption charges against Zardari and Gillani’s refusal to cooperate with the constitutional court over the Zardari charges.

But Hussain is not Zardari — it’s Sharif, instead, that has long been the head of the PML-N (the ‘N’ in the party’s name stands for Nawaz), and his brother Shahbaz Sharif has been the chief minister of Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province, since 2007.

Hussain, age 73, is a relatively little-known party loyalist, who remained faithful to the PML-N even after Musharraf, then Sharif’s army chief of staff, pushed Sharif out of office and into exile in 1999. Hussain previously served as the governor of Sindh province (traditionally a PPP stronghold) briefly from June to October 1999, when Musharraf took power by military force.

Hussain is a mohajir, a Muslim born in what is today Uttar Pradesh, India, and has been a textile businessman in Karachi and a former president of the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry. That makes Hussain somewhat of an outlier within PML-N politics — many of Karachi’s fellow mohajir support the secular Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM, متحدہ قومی موومنٹ), a Karachi-based party that represents mohajir interests and is now so strong that it holds a nearly mafia-like grip on Karachi government.

But in choosing the Karachi-based Hussain, a mohajir who lives in the PPP’s strongest province, Sharif has made a presidential choice that indicates he wants to put a more national stamp on his administration. Sharif owes his national government to his party’s overwhelming success in Punjab province, home to around 55% of the country’s population, where the PML-N won the majority of its 166 seats to Pakistan’s National Assembly. Continue reading Pakistan’s new president: Who is Mamnoon Hussain?→

As the second-in-command of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (i.e., what’s commonly referred to as the Pakistani Taliban), he’s responsible for many of the destabilizing attacks that the TTP effected in the lead-up to the May 11 parliamentary election. In selectively targeting the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎) and its allies, it effectively prevented the leaders of the PPP from openly and publicly campaigning, and they actually forced the son of the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, out of the country during the last days of the campaign.

No one thinks about ‘southwest Asia’ as among the world’s regions. But should we?

Consider for a moment that within the next 12 months, the world will witness the following:

the rollout of a new, more stable government headed by Nawaz Sharif in Pakistan dominated with the twin problems of regional security and economic growth, itself a transfer of power following the first civilian government to serve out a full term in office since Pakistan’s founding in 1947;

the selection of a new president for Pakistan in August 2013 to succeed Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto;

the selection of a new army chief of staff in Pakistan in November 2014 to succeed Ashfaq Kayani, who’s led Pakistan’s military since 2007 (when former general Pervez Musharraf was still in charge of Pakistan’s government) and who remains arguably the most powerful figure in Pakistan;

the election of a new government in Bangladesh before the end of January 2014 under the explosive backdrop of the ongoing 1971 war crimes tribunals and the Shahbagh protests of earlier this year; and

the election of a new government in India before the end of May 2014 — likely to be headed by the latest member of the incumbent party’s family dynasty, Rahul Gandhi, or the sprightly chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi — that will end of a decade of rule by prime minister Manmohan Singh.

Taken together, it’s a moment of extreme political change in South Asia, with turnover in each of the five pivotal countries (with a cumulative population of over 1.65 billion people) that touches and concerns the ‘Af-Pak’ region, and the greater South Asian region generally, which could well be the world’s most sensitive security theater and remains a critical region for global economic development — India is one of the four BRIC countries, and Bangladesh, Iran and Pakistan are each ‘Next Eleven’ countries.

That’s without mentioning the fact that we’ve just entered the first year of what’s expected to be a decade of leadership by Xi Jinping and the ‘Fifth Generation’ of Chinese Communist Party leadership in the People’s Republic of China, and the ongoing interest of Russia as a geopolitical player in the region, with so many former Central Asian Soviet republics bordering the region. It’s also without mentioning the thaw in political repression and diplomatic isolation currently underway in Burma/Myanmar.

For some time, discussion about the European Union has involved the caveat that major policy initiatives on EU policy, especially with respect to monetary union and fiscal union, are on hold until the German federal election, which will take place at the end of September 2013. It’s reasonable to assume that Angela Merkel will want to secure reelection as Germany’s chancellor before pushing forward with new changes.

But that pales in comparison to the political transformation that will take place in west Asia in the next 12 months, even though I see very few commentators discussing that when they talk about Iran, south Asia, Af-Pak, etc. In many ways, I think that’s because foreign policy analysis don’t typically think about this particular set of countries as a discrete region in its own right.

Iran comes up in the context of the Middle East and much more rarely in the context of Afghan or Pakistani security, even though Iran’s population is comprised of Persians and Azeris, not the Arabs who otherwise dominate the Middle East.

It’s more common to think about Pakistan today in the context of Afghanistan (for obvious U.S. security interest reasons) than in the context of Bangladesh, even though Bangladesh continues to battle over political ghosts that originated in its 1971 war of independence from Pakistan. But how much of that has to do with, say, early turf wars in the Obama administration between the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke and other envoys, or the Bush administration’s initial approach to the global war on terror?

It’s common to think about Pakistan, India and Bangladesh together (but not Iran) because they were so centrally administered together as part of the British empire from the 18th through the 20th century.

Looking forward through the end of the 2010s and the 2020s, do any of those linkages make as much sense?

Without channeling the spirit of Edward Said too much, what do we even call the region spanning from Tehran to Dhaka and from Mumbai to Kabul? West Asia? Southwest Asia?

Though I cringe to call it a Spring, make no mistake — the leadership realignment has the potential to remake world politics in ways that transcend even the Arab Spring revolts of 2010 and 2011.

Last week, even before all of the votes had been counted, when it was clear that Nawaz Sharif would be Pakistan’s next prime minister, he named his designee for finance minister — Ishaq Dar (pictured above).

Dar served as Sharif’s finance minister from 1998 until Sharif’s overthrow by army chief of staff Pervez Musharraf, and he spent much of his previous time as finance minister negotiating a loan package from the International Monetary Fund and dealing with the repercussions of economic sanctions imposed by the administration of U.S. president Bill Clinton on both India and Pakistan in retaliation for developing their nuclear arms programs.

Currently a member of Pakistan’s senate, Dar briefly joined a unity government as finance minister in 2008, though Dar and other Sharif allies quickly resigned over a constitutional dispute over Pakistan’s judiciary. The key point is that even across political boundaries, Dar is recognized as one of the most capable economics officials in Pakistan.

It was enough to send the Karachi Stock Exchange to a new high, and the KSE has continued to climb in subsequent days, marking a steady rally from around 13,360 last June to nearly 21,460 today. Investors are generally happy with the election result for three reasons:

First, it marks a change from the incumbent Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎), a party that has essentially drifted aimlessly in government for much of the past five years mired in fights with Pakistan’s supreme court and corruption scandals that affect Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari in lieu of a concerted effort to improve Pakistan’s economy.

Second, the election results will allow for a strong government dominated by Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن) instead of a weak and unstable coalition government.

Finally, Sharif’s party is viewed as pro-business and Sharif himself, more than any other party leader during the campaign, emphasized that fixing the economy would be his top priority. Sharif, who served as prime minister from 1990 to 1993 and again from 1997 to 1999, is already well-known for his attempts to reform Pakistan’s economy in his first term.

Sharif will need as much goodwill as he can, because the grim reality is that Pakistan is in trouble — and more than just its crumbling train infrastructure (though if you haven’t read it, Declan Walsh’s tour de force in The New York Times last weekend is a must-read journey by train through Pakistan and its economic woes). The past four years have marked sluggish GDP growth — between 3.0% and 3.7% — that’s hardly consistent with an expanding developing economy. In contrast, Pakistani officials estimate that the economy needs more like sustained 7% growth in order to deliver the kind of rise in living standards or a reduction in poverty or unemployment that could transform Pakistan into a higher-income nation. Already this year, Pakistan’s growth forecast has been cut from 4.2% to 3.5%.

The official unemployment rate is around 6%, but it’s clearly a much bigger problem, especially among youth — Pakistan’s median age is about 21 years old. That makes its population younger than the United States (median age of 37), the People’s Republic of China (35) or even Egypt (24), where restive youth propelled the 2011 demonstrations in Tahrir Square.

Although Pakistan’s poverty rates are lower than those in India and Bangladesh, they’re nothing to brag about — as of 2008, according to the World Bank, about 21% of Pakistan’s 176 million people lived on less than $1.25 per day, and fully 60% lived on less than $2 per day.

Though it has dropped considerably from its double-digit levels of the past few years (see below), inflation remains in excess of 5%, thereby wiping out much of the gains of the country’s anemic growth:

Pakistan is undeniably the ‘sick man’ of south Asia. India, even facing its own slump, has long since outpaced Pakistan over the past 20 years, and increasingly over the past decade, Bangladesh has consistently notched higher growth:

To make matters worse, Pakistan has a growing fiscal problem — although its public debt is lower than it used to be, it’s still over 60% of GDP, and a number of problems have led to debt-financed budgets in the past, including a 6.6% deficit in 2012.

That sets up a classic austerity-vs-growth conundrum for the Sharif government.

On the one hand, the familiar austerity hawks will argue that Sharif should focus on a reform program to lower Pakistan’s unsustainable deficits as a top priority. If, as expected, Sharif obtains a deal with the IMF for up to $5 million in additional financing to prevent a debt crisis later in 2013, the IMF could force Pakistan into a more aggressive debt reduction program than Sharif might otherwise prefer.

On the other hand, given the number of problems Pakistan faces, growth advocates will argue that Pakistan should focus on more pressing priorities and save budget-cutting for later. After all, with rolling blackouts plaguing the country, no one will invest in Pakistan regardless of the size of its debt. It’s also important to remember that Pakistan is not Europe — it’s an emerging economy with a young and growing population that could easily grow its way out of its debt problems in a way that seems impossible for a country like Italy or Greece.

Results are still coming in from Pakistan, but it’s become clear since Saturday that Nawaz Sharif and his party, had clearly won and will form the next government with Sharif leading a relatively strong government as Pakistan’s new prime minister.

The clear result and the presence of a strong government is good news for Pakistan and it’s good news for the rest of the world (including India, the United States and others), which has a stake in Pakistan’s stability. The problems that Sharif faces as Pakistan’s new leader are myriad — a floundering economy, a chronic energy crisis, and increasingly destabilizing attacks from the Tehrek-e-Taliban Pakistan (the Pakistani Taliban). That’s in addition to touchy endemic questions about cooperation with Pakistan’s military and intelligence leaders, ginger cross-border relations with India and the longstanding military alliance with the United States.

Amid that daunting agenda, it’s been easy to forget that keeping the nuclear-armed Pakistan united as one country is also a priority. But a quick look at the electoral geography of Saturday’s election demonstrates that Sharif should keep national unity atop his ledger as well.

The most surprising aspect of the election may have been the failure of Imran Khan and his anti-corruption party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice or PTI, پاکستان تحريک), to make significant gains in Punjab province. Though Punjab is essentially the PML-N’s heartland, and governing Punjab has been the Sharif family business for about three decades, Khan was expected to do better throughout urban Punjbab, especially in Lahore. That turned out to have been wrong. The PTI barely won as many seats as the incumbent Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎), which lost three-fourths of its seats, including the seat of its outgoing prime minister, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf.

But that’s one side of the more intriguing — and, I believe, more enduring — aspect of the Saturday’s result.

That’s the extent to which each of Pakistan’s four provinces essentially supported a different party. See below a map of results from 2008’s election. There are certainly regional strongholds, especially with the PML-N (shown below in blue) taking most of its strength in Punjab province. But the PPP (shown below in red) won seats in all four provinces of the country, including in Punjab. Likewise, the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) (پاکستان مسلم لیگ ق, or the PML-Q), which supported former military leader Pervez Musharraf throughout the 2000s (shown below in green), won strong support throughout the country.*

Now take a look at the election map of Saturday’s results from Pakistan’s Dawn:

The election map this time around isn’t nearly as messy — the PPP’s seats (shown in magenta) come nearly exclusively from Sindh province, the PML-N (shown in light blue) will form a government based almost exclusively on its strength in Punjab and without any of the national support that the PPP commanded in 2008. Khan’s PTI (shown in crimson), despite a handful of support in Sindh and Punjab, won most of its seats in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The PPP’s allied liberal Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM, متحدہ قومی موومنٹ) (shown in gray) won all of its seats in Karachi. That isn’t surprising given that it’s long dominated city politics within Karachi and has virtually no footprint outside Karachi, but it serves as yet another discrete mini-province even within Sindh.

In Balochistan, which borders Iran to its east and Afghanistan to its north, Balochi nationalists, sympathetic independents, and the conservative Islamist Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (جمیعت علمائے اسلام‎) (shown in olive green) dominated.

Votes are still being counted across Pakistan two days after its nationwide general elections, and the big winner is former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, whose center-right party defeated the unpopular incumbent party and held back a spirited challenge from the anti-corruption party led by charismatic cricket star Imran Khan.

The election results were a wipeout victory for Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن), and Sharif will come into office with a broader mandate and a more stable government than the one he’ll replace.

That, alone, is of vital importance to the United States, which has about as strong an interest in Sharif’s victory, a peaceful transition from the outgoing Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎), and the ongoing success of Sharif’s government over the next five years.

Pakistan, with 180 million people, is more populous than nearly every other country in the world — only China, India, the United States, Indonesia and (just barely) Brazil have more human beings. But given that it was essentially a fabricated nation when it gained independence in 1947 as the Muslim-majority nations partitioned from India, it’s never been a fully cohesive country, even in the way that the sprawling and diverse Indian and Chinese nations are. That means that governing Pakistan is already a challenge, and that will likely continue, with each of Pakistan’s four provinces dominated by another party — the PPP retains its stronghold in Sindh province, the PML-N overwhelmingly won its stronghold in the most populous Punjab province, and Khan’s upstart Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice or PTI, پاکستان تحريک) will now control the provincial assembly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Pakistan’s location means that it’s a key piece of U.S.-led efforts to reduce the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and it’s on the periphery of the axis between India and China that will power the global economy for decades to come. It goes without saying that the United States has a huge interest in a safer, more prosperous, more democratic Pakistan, and the United States now has an interest in facilitating as much success as possible for the Sharif government.

It’s an incredibly busy weekend for world elections, with four key elections on three continents coming in the next four days.

Pakistan

First up, on Saturday, May 11, are national elections in Pakistan, where voters will determine the composition of the 342-member National Assembly, of which 272 seats will be determined by direct election in single-member constituencies on a first-past-the-post basis.

With 180 million people and with nearly 60% of them under the age of 30, the elections in Pakistan will by far have the most global impact by implicating South Asia’s economy and not only regional, but global security with U.S. interests keen to mark a stable transition, especially after a particularly violent campaign season marked with attacks by the Pakistani Taliban.

The incumbent government led by the leftist Pakistan People’s Party, the party of the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto and Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari, is expected to falter. Their expense is likely to come at the gain of the more conservative Pakistan Muslim League (N), led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who is a slight favorite to once again become Pakistan’s prime minister on the strength of support in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province. But the upstart nationalist, anti-corruption Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) is expected to make a strong challenge under the leadership of Imran Khan, the charismatic former cricket star.

On Sunday, May 12, it’s Bulgaria’s turn, and voters will decide who controls the unicameral National Assembly .

When the 2008 global financial crisis hit, the center-left Bulgarian Socialist Party was in office under prime minister Sergei Stanishev. Voters promptly ejected Stanishev and the Socialists in the 2009 elections in exchange for a new conservative party, Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) under the wildly popular Boyko Borissov. Since 2009, however, Borissov and GERB have become massively unpopular, and rising power costs and general economic malaise have made conditioned markedly worse. The depressed economy and a wiretapping scandal have left the race essentially a tossup between the Socialists and GERB, though a number of small parties, including an far-right nationalist party and an ethnic Turkish party, are expected to win seats.

Of the 240 seats in the National Assembly, 209 will be determined by proportional representation (with a 4% threshold for entering parliament) and 31 will be determined in single-member districts. With just 7.5 million people, Bulgaria is on the periphery of the European Union — if the result is close and no party wins a majority, it will cause some concern in Brussels, but because Bulgaria isn’t a member of the eurozone, that outcome wouldn’t necessarily cause any wider financial problems.

The action moves back to Asia on Monday, May 13, when the Philippines votes in midterm elections to determine one-half of the Senate’s 24 seats and all of the 222 seats in the Philippine House of Representatives.

Although, with 94 million people, the Philippines has a population of just about half that of Pakistan, it’s a strategic country with an increasingly important economic, cultural and military alliance with the United States as U.S. policymakers ‘pivot’ to Asia. It doesn’t hurt that the country’s economic growth rate in 2012 of 6.6% was the fastest in all of Asia, excepting the People’s Republic of China.

All of which means that the current president, Benigno ‘PNoy’ Aquino III, whose father was the opposition leader assassinated in 1983 and whose mother, Corazon Aquino, became Philippine president in 1986 after 21 years of rule by Ferdinand Marcos, is an incredibly popular head of state. His electoral coalition, ‘Team PNoy,’ dominated by his own Liberal Party, is widely expected to make big gains, giving Aquino a little more help facing an unfriendly legislature.

Finally, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, voters in Canada’s third-most populous province, British Columbia, will vote for all 85 members of its legislative assembly on Tuesday, May 14.

The British Columbia Liberal Party is seeking its fourth consecutive mandate since Gordon Campbell won elections in 2001, 2005 and 2009. After stepping down in 2011, his successor Christy Clark finds herself waging an uphill battle to win over the hearts of an electorate jaded by scandal after scandal. The frontrunner to become the next premier is Adrian Dix, the leader of the British Columbia New Democratic Party, though his opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline and a feisty campaign by the Liberals have whittled a 20-point lead two months ago to just single digits.

Though British Columbia is home to just 4.4 million people, the result will have important implications for Canada’s energy industry as well as potential implications for the NDP’s national future — a high-profile loss for Dix will only spell further trouble for the national party.

Pakistan’s voters choose a new government tomorrow in what will be the first set of elections that follows the completion of a full five-year term by a civilian government.

Here are ten open questions to keep in mind throughout Saturday’s election and in the hours and days following the election.

Will violence seriously mar Saturday’s election?

Given that the election campaign has become increasingly violent, with a growing number of bomb and other attacks coming from the ‘Pakistani Taliban’ — the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, تحریک طالبان پاکستان), the incumbent party of president Asif Ali Zardari, the leftist Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎) and other parties have forced to run subdued campaigns without the kind of large-scale rallies that typically figure in campaign season, even in chaotic Pakistan. Pakistan’s military has deployed police and other security personnel throughout the country, but will the Pakistani Taliban allow voting to take place in a peaceful environment? Given that its leaders have condemned democracy as incompatible with Islamic teachings, it seems unlikely that the Pakistani Taliban won’t attempt some disruption, though the excitement around the second openly competitive election in five years may well lead to record turnout.

Will Imran Khan and the PTI finally win serious support?

For years, the longstanding paradigm of Pakistani civilian politics has pitted the more leftist PPP, dominated by the Bhutto family (Zardari is the widower of the late former prime minister Benazir Bhutto) against the more conservative Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن) of Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister in the 1990s. But this time around, voters have given a more enduring look to Imran Khan, the cricket star-turned-philanthropist-turned-politican, the charismatic leader of the nationalist, anti-corruption Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice or PTI, پاکستان تحريک). Khan has drawn together a very mixed coalition of supporters — including elements of the military, former supporters of Pervez Musharraf, the former military leader of Pakistan from 1999 to 2008 and radical Islamists in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who applaud his stance in opposition to U.S. drone strikes. But his core supporters include many urban dwellers and younger voters — that’s not insignificant considering that around 60% of Pakistan’s population is under the age of 30. Polls show that his party is either tied or running slightly behind the PML-N and Sharif. Given that the party’s won just one seat in Pakistan’s National Assembly since its foundation in 1996, however, Khan is on the precipice of his biggest success in nearly two decades of politics.

How will Pakistan’s armed forces respond to the result?

The military, led by army chief of staff Ashfaq Kayani, has remained behind the scenes since the end of the Musharraf era, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have a role to play in Pakistani politics. Kayani is undoubtedly the most important figure in the country today, and he’ll remain so until a new government is elected, which will have the task of appointing a replacement for Kayani, who steps down in November 2013. Sharif, who remains the favorite to become Pakistan’s next prime minister, has a shaky relationship with the military — Musharraf, after all, was appointed army chief of staff by Sharif before he ousted him in a coup 14 years ago. Although Sharif has pledged to appoint as Kayani’s successor the highest-ranking army official to help depoliticize the decision, he’s also called for open talks with the Pakistani Taliban over the country’s deteriorating security situation, a stance that is sure to make top military officials wary. Together with the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s intelligence network, the military retains a significant amount of control over security and foreign policy.

What will the result mean for Afghanistan, India and Iran?

It’s a time of transition throughout the region. Iran, which remains economically crippled by U.S.-led sanctions over its nuclear program, is set to elect a successor to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June. In Afghanistan, U.S. troops are set to leave the country at the end of the year, and a new president will be selected in April 2014 elections — if he’s true to his word, 12-year incumbent Hamid Karzai will not run for reelection. In India, parliamentary elections before May 2014 will determine the next government in what increasingly seems like a showdown between Rahul Gandhi and Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.

If Pakistan has a strong, stable government that’s able to ignite economic growth, boost investment, tackle corruption, and de-escalate sectarian violence in the coming months, it will make the transitions in each of Pakistan’s neighbors much smoother. If not, Pakistani Taliban combatants could well contribute to massive destabilization in Afghanistan or ignite further tensions with India along the border of the contested province of Kashmir.

In short, if Pakistan unravels after the election, it could well take down at least Afghanistan with it, an obvious cause of global concern, and it could seriously jeopardize the tense peace with India as well.

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I said he was one of the top 13 politicians to watch in 2013 at the beginning of the year, and he’s the next great hope of not just the Bhutto family’s political legacy, but for the entire political fortunes of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎),, and the May 2013 elections were supposed to mark his grand entrance into Pakistani politics.

But with just a handful of days left in the PPP’s campaign to hold on to power in Pakistan, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has been all but absent from the campaign, and news reports claim that he’s actually no longer within Pakistan due to security threats against him.

The reason? The widespread violence already perpetrated and currently threatened against the PPP in particular by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, تحریک طالبان پاکستان), the ‘Pakistani Taliban’ terrorist group that opposes the government, above all for its cozy links to U.S. and NATO defense forces.

But the fact that the son of Pakistan’s current president, Asif Ali Zardari, has left the country out of concern for his life, speaks to the current state of Pakistan’s security situation. Bhutto Zardari, at age 24, is still too young to contest Saturday’s elections, and he was never seriously considered as a possibility to emerge as prime minister in 2013.

His decision proved especially wise today in light of the abduction of Ali Haider Gilani, the son of former PPP prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.

You can question whether it’s healthy for one family to play such an oversized role in politics (whether the Bhutto family in Pakistan, the Gandhi family in India or even the Bush family in the United States), but there’s no doubt that Bhutto’s family has paid dearly for its starring role in the center of Pakistan’s civilian politics.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who founded the PPP, led Pakistan’s government in the 1970s, but a military government convicted and executed him in 1979.

Benazir Bhutto, who served as prime minister in the 1980s and the 1990s, was assassinated in a December 2007 bomb blast just days after she returned from abroad to contest the 2008 parliamentary elections.

So you can’t really blame Bhutto Zardari for keeping such a low profile — he’s barely just reached adulthood after an adolescence spent mostly abroad, matched by the twin tragedies of his mother’s assassination and the ghost of his grandfather’s execution.

But his absence marks an even wider leadership crisis in Pakistan’s governing party. Though there are many reasons why the PPP is slumping in the 2013 elections, one factor is certainly the lack of any sort of strong presence at the head of the party.

Although Zardari and his son are the joint leaders of the PPP, Zardari, as Pakistan’s head of state, is unable to take a full-throated role leading the campaign. Nor would be incredibly effective if he could — he won the presidency in 2008 in part through sympathy for his late wife, Benazir, and his tenure in office has been marked by widespread corruption and impunity.

That’s left the PPP virtually decapitated throughout the campaign. That stands in contrast to its two major rivals, the Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن) and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice or PTI, پاکستان تحريک). The ‘N’ in PML-N stands for Nawaz Sharif, one of Pakistan’s wealthiest businessmen who was twice elected prime minister in the 1990s. The PTI’s leader, Imran Khan, has been active in Pakistani politics as an anti-corruption crusader for two decades and was a national cricket star in the years prior to his entry into politics.

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Suffragio attempts to bring thoughtful analysis to the political, economic and other policy issues that are central to countries outside of the US -- to make world politics less foreign to the US audience. Suffragio focuses, in particular, on those countries and regions with upcoming or recent elections.